by sophiea
New therapies mean HIV patients gain longer lives, face new challenges:
[Via Eureka! Science News – Popular science news]
New HIV therapies have prolonged lives and improved health for patients with HIV, but the treatments have also brought the longer-term effects of the disease into sharper focus.
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New therapies mean that people infected with HIV are living longer. As the researchers state, it is more like a chronic disease and they are now observing changes in the physical aspects in patients not seen before because the patients died.
In this case, those with HIV smoke more than the average population. About twice as much. This report indicates that they suffer loss of lung function at a pretty rapid rate. The sort of decrease that the researchers saw in 2 years was the “type of decline you might expect to see in elderly individuals who have a long history of smoking.”
These sorts of physical problems will result in new types of therapy to deal with them. It is nice to see that the next step in this research is to determine what happens if the HIV-infected patients stop smoking. This would seem to be a very good thing to attempt. Now to figure out the mechanism for this rapid decrease in lung function.
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